For those of you that have had enough interaction with me, the term "stretching the rubber band" is recognized as part of my everyday language and a link to my heretic mind. For these and of course the others, I write my heresy today: we must live our lives continually stretching our own rubber band.
The recipe to stretch the rubber band is very simple, it must be stretched to the point where we feel the pain, but not so much to break it, both ingredients are crucial to the recipe (I have other recepies like "fried sancocho" and "french arepas").
So here is in more detail, part one: stretch the rubber band until it hurts. If you do not feel the pain, there is no growth, if no pain is felt it means that we are in our comfort zone and there is nothing new, nothing that makes us grow. Growth, by its very nature, hurts; so when we feel that pain, when we feel that unfomfortability, when we feel that pressuring sensation that comes from the chest and stomach and leaves our noses with a "nnnnshhhh" that is annoying, horrible, fearful, that is how we know that we are on the right track and it is absolutely fabulous.
We must learn to love that pain, we must become familiar with the feeling to identify with excitement and know that if the feeling is there, we are making it worth being alive, we're stretching our rubber band!
The second part of the recipe: do not stretch it so much that you will break it. If the rubber band just bursts we loose perspective, we loose connection, we loose a piece of our being, ahh and of course we have lost the rubber band itself!. We must then learn to identify the moment just before we our band breaks and loosen it, relax it, reduce tension, give ourselves a moment, but only that, a moment to breath and take all the growth in, a small pause before we re-stretch it again; if we don't make that pause, our band will burst...
This my friends is the famous art of stretching the rubber band, a term that I have on the way of patenting. It's simple: you have to stretch the rubber band, you must give love and passion in life, work, relationships, personal development all the way to the point of pain and just before the limit of irretrievable breakdown. Again, for those of you who have worked , studied or lived with me, that feeling in the stomach, chest and nose is familiar; after most of my lectures I give participants a rubber band as a souvenir and reminder for stretching the rubber band, so today I am giving you a virtual rubber band with the hope that you start your daily exercise of stretching your own rubber band, just as the recipe says.
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